LinkedIn Recruitment Strategy. We’ve talked before about how much the recruitment industry has changed over the last ten years – emphasising the need to use Facebook in your strategy. This market shift has launched a whole new social world whereby professionals and employers now interact and connect on a daily basis via social media, in particular LinkedIn.

1. Figure out why people want to work for you, and emphasize that through your EVP.

Five years ago, Raleigh, NC-based Epic Games, the company behind Grand Theft Auto and Gears of War, could count on brand recognition to attract the artists, engineers, producers and designers it needed.

“Everyone came from within our industry,” said Tim Johnson, Director of Recruiting at Epic, during the session on developing employee value proposition.

But Epic’s business eventually morphed from that of a traditional console game developer to distributing and marketing its games. The shift changed the number and type of people the company needed to hire, Johnson said.

More competition and less brand recognition in the now wider talent pool provided the catalyst for working on Epic’s employer brand and employee value proposition (EVP). However, not being a “classically trained marketer,” Johnson presented a branding proposal to the exec team that basically said, “If I pay enough people to put our logos on things, people will want to come work for us.”

After getting torpedoed, Johnson went behind the scenes to better define and communicate Epic’s EVP. He talked to people from all disciplines – new hires, top performers, junior workers, people who left and candidates who turned down offers – to understand what employees cared about and why they loved their jobs. Based on their feedback, Epic introduced perks like unlimited vacation and flex work. And when Johnson learned employees felt the company came across as arrogant, he changed the tone of their messaging.

Ultimately, Johnson boiled the insights down into an EVP that the team captured on video and shared across their owned channels and in their advertising. Today the talent acquisition team is part of the discussion about how Epic’s culture will evolve, based on their knowledge of what employees want and need.